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5 Responses to “Revisiting “Manufacturing Consent””  

1. 1 Matt Wood Sep 25th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

   Ben-

   One expected corollary of Dependency Theory should be that as the intensity of dependency between social actors lessens, “power” should begin to re-concentrate in the individual. Indeed, something of this sort appears to be almost trivially true of primitive societies, in comparison to our own: Small hunter-gatherer tribes likely convey their entire memetic storehouse to each individual tribesman during socialization, allowing each individual to reap a high individual survival value. In other words, each individual is capable of survival beyond adolescence without the cooperation of others. Dependency is low, and hence the capacity for coercion by other social actors is low.

   The innovations of agriculture (and consequent generation of durable food surpluses) seem to have had two primary effects: (1) a gradual erosion of the transmission (and hence preservation) of self-contained survival skills, and (2) the rise of specialized knowledge domains and the strategy of survival-by-trade. The ability of agricultural societies to generate greater population density relative to hunter-gatherer societies, coupled with competition for land, likely lead to the assimilation of non-agrarian peoples with agrarian ones. Once assimilated, the lack of a viable alternative to civilization forced each successive generation to continue and intensify this chain of mutual dependency. [Contrast with the large number of colonial Americans, including fugitive slaves, who joined Native American tribes prior to their assimilation/containment.]

   The pressures facing journalists in the marketplace of ideas are no different: they, like a significant majority of human beings in the last 11,000 years, practice the strategy of survival-by-trade.

   I am sometimes amazed at what might be termed a ‘failure of the marketplace’ to produce incisive factual reporting. Take, for example, the study published in Political Science Quarterly’s Winter 03-04 issue, comparing the rate of factual misperceptions related to the present Iraq war across media outlets. The rate of such misperceptions as “conclusive evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda has been found” among audience members were consistently twice as high or more for commerical media outlets such as CNN or Fox News than NPR/PBS. While the well-worn adage “correlation does not prove causation” applies here with force, the findings are nonetheless suggestive.

   Strange that modern government-funded information may be more accurate than its commerically-produced counterpart, especially when one considers the olde Stationer’s Company of Great Britain, which enjoyed a monopoly on the country’s publishing industry from the 16th to 18th centuries (in exchange for self-censorship favorable to the Crown, of course). This state of affairs let to English poet John Milton’s condemnation of “licensing” (or, as we now know it, the ‘marketplace of ideas’) as a force that “hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth”… in his essay Areopagitica.

2. 2 Ben Samuel Nelson Sep 26th, 2006 at 8:46 pm

   Matt, although on first blush that may seem like an attractive companion, it’s ultimately an empirical question. Though, sure, we can still wonder about it and make preliminary observations.

   On the one hand, it seems easy to see how the mature HGG member is less dependent upon others in terms of mastering resources, i.e., in order to hunt, one may behave relatively autonomously, if they know what they’re doing. MIS members rely upon specialized divisions of labor and all of that, making it obvious that they’re wildly interdependent when it comes to an economy of goods. On the other hand, it is also easy to see certain necessary points of dependency that any kind of society will have. IE: how the immature members are dependent upon knowledge (i.e., what food to pick and what to avoid) and technology (how to fashion a trap) from mature members.

   More unique to the HGG, those who inhabit small communities, being relatively isolated, seem to be in greater danger of engaging in cult-like behavior, whose threats of retaliation and peer pressure create an extreme form of punishment-based dependency. And we can presume that the HGG member wants to procreate, so without contact with possible outside mates, they are utterly dependent upon immediate group members for their mating opportunities. These are things that are lessened to an extent in MIS, where isolation is more difficult, and opportunities are somewhat increased.

   The Durkheimian picture I have in mind is, that HGGs have a lower number/density of people exerting a higher level of control over one another, while MISs have a higher number/density of people exerting a lower level of control. But, again, that’s not a picture I can take for granted; it’s an empirical question, and for all I know, you may be entirely correct.

3. 3 Matt Wood Sep 27th, 2006 at 11:10 am

   Ben-
   Great points. My intuition was that HGG members have greater material autonomy and hence lesser dependence on other social actors, while you may be absolutely right that this gain is offset by the intensity of other social forces (such as procreative needs, kinship bonds, and the vestigial affections of childhood, which may be necessary for the cultural transmission of knowledge). Indeed, your point about MISs having high number/density of people, each exerting lower levels of control, is well taken: in a modern market economy, I am dependent upon *some* social actor for such basic needs as food, clothing, and shelter, but market competition lessens my dependence on any one particular actor. Perhaps a more accurate description would be that I am dependent upon the social systems of production - my culture having abandoned transmission of self-contained survival skills some time ago. [Side question: Can “power” be allocated to the social system - rather than individual social actors - within Dependency Theory, or is that a meaningless statement?]

   But perhaps this is a hidden virtue of the market economy, which in fact obeys the corollary I mentioned in my first comment. Compare, for example, the distribution of power within a feudalistic society. To the extent that the “system of production” is controlled by individual social actors (for example, land owned and controlled by feudal lords), dependence on the “system of production” translates into dependence on individual social actors, and power concentrates along the lines of this dependence. But the modern market economy contains an interesting “paradox”: Never before has knowledge been so compartmentalized, and hence dependence on the system of production so great. And yet never before have individual social actors exerted so little control over their fellow social actors.

   The solution to this paradox seems to lie in the large sphere of cordiality that characterizes the relationships between modern human communities. The development of this sphere enables calm, rational transactions between broadly dispersed social actors, and seems to be enabled by (at least) two forces: (1) productivity gains, which incentivize broad-based trade, and (2) the memetic evolution of phenomenological objects which knit together the affections of diverse communities (such as the tribe, class, race, nation, or even, today, the species). In fact, these two forces likely drove one another in a reciprocating fashion across time. Something like this phenomenon appears to be at work in the radical re-organization of European society (in a self-organizing fashion) away from top-down feudalistic control of resources by small monarchies, and towards larger mixed agrarian/mercantile kingdoms … and eventually representative government.

4. 4 Ben Samuel Nelson Sep 28th, 2006 at 12:28 pm

   In order to answer your question, I should first recap some things in order to make sense of where we’re at in the bigger conversation. My understanding of dependency theory as described by Linda Molm (expanding upon earlier reward-based work by Richard Emerson et al) locates the theory within exchange relations in a social network. Its core thesis is that uneven dependency is where power comes from. In other words, if I need you more than you need me, then you have power over me.

   Originally this was a positive economistic sort of theory, speaking more about tangible rewards than of punishments. Molm, inspired by separate literatures, pushed the envelope by asking us to consider the power of dependency as derived from punishments. Your Rosseauian point pushes the boundaries a bit further, by asking us to regard dependency theory, not just in exchange relations, but also with respect to the agent and their environment — in other words, not just social power, but also the power of the individual in achieving (relatively) autonomous economic goals. This implicitly teaches us two lessons: first, it reminds us that goal-achievement seems to be the outer limit of what we might consider a possible holder of power; and second, that social power is not the only kind of power one might possess.

   Whether or not dependency theory can accomodate the social system at large — that is, whether or not we can say that a system has “power” — depends on whether or not we want to attribute some kind of agency to that system. If we don’t attribute agency to the system (however it is conceived), then we might as well be talking about the “power” of inert objects: buildings, trucks, grass. In other words, if the social system cannot be conceived as agentic, then it has no power. (Milton Friedman, in the film “The Corporation”, made an argument along these lines, concluding that a particular kind of social system has no agency.) If on the other hand we do attribute agency to the social system, then it may be considered a holder of power; but that raises all kinds of philosophical worries. (Patrick O’Donnell in my last post mentioned the importance of methodological individualism in such an analysis, and that’s a point well taken — MI theorists would probably resist calling a social system “agentic”.) Ultimately, the question of whether or not a social system can be called “agentic” depends on a) what a social system really “is”, in natural terms (and what kind of social system we’re talking about); and b) whether or not it is a goal-achieving entity.

   Still, even if we were to say that systems are non-agentic, we can certainly talk of people being dependent on inert objects, like systems or oxygen or whatever. It’s an interesting question as to how dependency theory would treat the relation between the individual and their environment.

   The idea that we’re beholden to arbitrary persons in some set of people, instead of on specific people, seems to demand a distinction. We have, on the one hand, organizations — that is, networks of particular persons engaged in habitual behavior, with particular roles and functions — and we have institutions, which are abstract systems with all the characteristics of an organization, except that we’re indifferent to the identity of the particular persons involved, and the abstract system sits at a level of popularity which is wider than one particular organization. The feudal system of production is an example of an institution, while particular kingdoms are examples of organizations. A member of an HGG is dependent upon their organization, while an MIS is dependent upon those organizations which make up functional institutions.

   To put your paradox in this language, then, we might observe that MISers are dependent upon certain modern institutions (where the emphasis is upon habits and roles), while HGGers are dependent upon local organizations (where the emphasis is upon actions and interactions). No doubt that reason, in conjunction with economic prosperity and broad affiliation, is a worthy goal, and couldn’t hurt any attempt to make positive change. But those observations are subject to issues of, say, distributive justice, the methods of cultivating reason (education), the formation of identity and the will to combat sectarianism, and so on.

   Another paradox arises out of observations on the classic problems of sociology as phrased in the language of dependency. On first blush, it would seem that it would be attractive to conclude that, just as asymmetry in dependence leads to power inequity, symmetry in dependence leads to power equity. In other words, that independence and interdependence are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing. That would explain the relative growth of autonomy and liberty under modern divisions of labor in some respects: as we become more interdependent, we appear to become more independent. The relative shrinkage of autonomy and liberty in the other areas you mentioned may be explained by the alienation of the actor(s) from possible rewards, by virtue of the narrowing of the networks in which they belong, and consequently also limiting the opportunity for new organizations to grow (a kind of “glass floor”).

5. 5 Matt Wood Oct 9th, 2006 at 2:55 pm

   Ben-
   Reconnecting with your original post, there’s a debate buried in the following article that nicely illuminates some of the Propoganda Model’s filters:

   WashPost: Olbermann News Commentaries Target Bush

   Jeff Cohen, a former producer for (liberal) Phil Donahue’s abortive talk show on MSNBC, appears to at least partially attribute Olbermann’s freedom of speech to a shift in MSNBC’s “political zeitgeist”. [Cohen apparently alleges in his new book that MSNBC put pressure on Donahue to book more conservative than liberal guests and imitate Bill O’Reilly.]

   But NBC News senior vice president Phil Griffin claims that the Donahue show was simply too expensive and didn’t draw adequate ratings: “People try to ascribe motives to us, that somehow we’re trying to keep liberals off the air and it’s all about ideology. If you get ratings, there’s no issue.”

   Quote from Olbermann: “As dangerous as it can sometimes be for news, it is also our great protector. Because as long as you make them money, they don’t care. This is not Rupert Murdoch. And even Rupert Murdoch puts `Family Guy’ on the air and `The Simpsons,’ that regularly criticize Fox News. There is some safety in the corporate structure that we probably could never have anticipated.”

   —
   A couple of observations:
   1) The pressure applied to Donahue (if true) suggests that ideology can influence coverage, but apparently (at least in this case) in the service of ratings, and not as an unconscious filter. [This may be irrelevant to the Model, which I understand addresses ideology primarily in the context of domestic papers’ coverage of foreign affairs. This observation may be better associated with the ‘funding’ filter, which operates via the structural necessity of acquiring appreciable audiences in order to attract advertisers/customers. Although it seems to promote a plurality of opinion in this case, the funding filter cuts both ways, and could conceivably at some point result in pressure on Olbermann to dilute his tirades if they promoted, say, widespread regulation of certain business interests.]

   2) MSNBC is apparently owned by General Electric Co., which raises interesting questions about the potential for news-suppression, particularly investigations of malfeasance by GE or its subsidiaries. (Organizational ownership prong. Compare with the Olbermann’s comments about Murdoch.)

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